Thursday, April 13, 2017

"The Mist" TV trailer, "Strange Days" (Jim Morrison & The Witch)

Stephen King’s 1980 novella The Mist, about a small town lucky enough to be engulfed in a mysterious fog filled with monsters, is getting the TV series treatment at Spike, and as a trailer shows, series creator Christian Torpe has expanded the Mist-o-verse. While the novella (and Frank Darabont’s 2007 feature film) was set almost entirely in a single supermarket, the TV show, with hours to fill, will add everyone’s favorite thing about television: subplots! Now we’ll get to see how other, nonsupermarket-shopping inhabitants deal with the onslaught, whether they are trapped in a church, a mall, or even a car. What’s more, the mist itself now appears to have psychological effects on those caught in it, rather than simply being a convenient harbinger for a deadly attack by prehistoric monsters. The Mist will premiere on Spike on June 22, which should allow plenty of time for binge-watching before the actual mist arrives in late August.

Despite these changes, however, it seems like Torpe has stayed true to the positive and uplifting theme that has made the novella such a favorite all these years: Give people an excuse, no matter how slim, and they’ll bring back human sacrifice faster than you can say “Stephen King’s The Mist.” The cast list doesn’t include the characters from the story, so there’s no Mrs. Carmody, the religious nut who first suggests appeasing the monsters Old Testament–style in earlier versions of The Mist. Smart money’s on Frances Conroy’s character taking her place—she looks like she’s got some of that old-time religion in the trailer, plus she’s named “Natalie Raven.” In the novel, Mrs. Carmody is an elderly townswoman with a borderline reputation as a witch and an extreme belief in a bloodthirsty God. She actively thrives in the situation, eventually convincing a large fraction of the survivors that a human sacrifice must be made to clear away the mist. Source: www.slate.com

"Strange Days" is a narcissistic memoir of, mostly, a love affair with Jim Morrison. When Kennealy met the rock star in the third-to-last year of his life, they shook hands and there was a ``visible shower of bright blue sparks.'' ``What are you?'' Morrison asked. Kennealy replied that she was a witch--a Celtic high priestess. Then, she says, Morrison married her by her Celtic coven (a ceremony that -Kennealy admitted in Victoria Balfour's Rock Wives book-Morrison took “probably not too seriously”) and, in a ``blaze of love and passion ignited,'' they consummated their union six times in two hours. Morrison (who never lived with Kennealy) is a nebulous presence here, impossible to visualize by manner or by the romance-novel speeches supplied for him, and appears mostly as a foil to the Kennealy ego--which is queen-sized. Much ado about the high priestess, not enough about the Lizard King. Source: www.kirkusreviews.com